Why I surveyed DrupalCon 2025 attendees? – Separating hype from reality

AI was the dominant topic at DrupalCon 2025. Everyone was talking about it. And the demand for answers has arrived before most of us have even defined the questions.

So I decided to go straight to the source: the developers, agency owners, and content strategists navigating this transition in real time. I created a simple survey – not to generate data, but as a way to connect with people beyond conference small talk and have real conversations about what they’re thinking.

The survey had several questions, but two proved most revealing: “Is AI an opportunity or a threat?” and “Can you summarise AI in one word?”

I discovered honest uncertainty mixed with cautious optimism, real fears tempered by practical wisdom, and most importantly: patterns in how people are actually thinking about AI adoption.

Read on to find out what I learned about the state of AI anxiety, why Drupal’s approach stands out in a landscape of vaporware and obsolescence, and a practical roadmap you can follow to start implementing today.

The state of AI anxiety: Voices from DrupalCon 2025

“Can you summarise AI in one word?”

The answers came quickly and revealed everything: “Hype”, “Revolution”, “Gamechanger”, “Potential”, “Uncertainty”, “Change”, “Aspirational”… and perhaps most telling: “Now. Not the future, but now. It became ‘now’ very quickly.”

That last response captures something essential. AI has moved from theoretical to immediate, faster than most organisations could ever have expected.

“Is AI an opportunity or a threat?”

The answer was almost always “both.” The nuance revealed a complexity we are all faced with:

“An opportunity to work fast, to work better. But also a threat because it can be used to create fake content and news. Misleading information.”

“Opportunity – making my day more productive and effective. Saving time. Threat – because how much of my role will it take?”

The concern about displacement extended beyond individuals. “Customers think we can do things faster, cheaper, and with less people,” one agency representative told me, highlighting how AI is already reshaping client expectations.

Yet there was pragmatism: “It helps build things faster, but it needs validation at all steps.” And forward-thinking vision:

“Better tooling means fewer developers will exist. But the opportunity is that we can deliver new features we don’t have to anticipate, for example a module that could learn to provide a solution without ECA and stuff, where a chatbot can work things out like when to refund a customer or contact a supplier.”

The overwhelming consensus? AI represents both an extraordinary opportunity and a potential threat. Which one it becomes for your organisation depends entirely on your strategy and preparation.

This isn’t just happening in the Drupal community. As Christoph Breidert and Frederik Wouters (u/wouters_f) highlighted in their DrupalCon session Drupal AI – Strategy and Application, the CEO of Boston Consulting Group recently stated that at the C-level, AI is “the topic everyone’s talking about.” The numbers back this up: 78% of organisations already use AI in some business process, and 92% plan to increase their AI investments. Perhaps most striking: research suggests we’re only at 1% of what’s possible with AI.

So we can now define our first question: Do you have a roadmap?

Drupal’s AI readiness: Built on solid ground

The uncertainty many feel about AI doesn’t need to extend to the platform you build on. Drupal has been preparing for this moment with a commitment that is backed by both vision and investment.

The vision is clear. As Dries Buytaert (u/dries), founder of Drupal, explains in the Drupal AI initiative’s mission statement:

“Drupal will democratise AI powered digital experiences through an open framework where innovation flourishes under responsible human guidance. We envision a world where organisations of any size can create intelligent, adaptive digital experiences without compromise and where advanced AI capabilities enhance human creativity rather than replace it.”

In his DrupalCon 2025 keynote, Dries revealed something remarkable: Drupal’s painful modernisation during the Drupal 8 transition inadvertently created AI-ready infrastructure. Content versioning and configuration management – features built for developer workflows – now enable safe AI experimentation with reliable rollback capabilities. The structured content model and fine-grained permissions system are precisely what AI agents need to operate safely and effectively. As Dries put it, Drupal has become one of the most AI-ready frameworks in the world.

Launched in mid-2024, the Drupal AI initiative represents something unprecedented in open source. In just five months, the initiative raised $1 million – the largest fundraising effort in Drupal’s history. 22 agency partners have joined as makers, contributing not just funding but full-time engineering resources. This isn’t venture capital chasing returns – it’s a community investing in shared infrastructure.

The momentum is accelerating. Development cycles are rapid, with new features and recipes being released regularly. And critically, this isn’t proprietary technology locked behind licensing fees. This is open source AI infrastructure that any organisation can adopt, adapt, and build upon.

Your DrupalCon-inspired roadmap: Start safe, scale smart

At DrupalCon 2025 I attended sessions that presented a multitude of AI capabilities and features that have been brought to life by hard-working contributors. Almost every session revealed something new – from AI-powered alt text generation to agent swarms orchestrating complex workflows. So with all these features and changes being made available in Drupal, where do you start?

Here’s my four-phase AI roadmap organised by implementation complexity and business value and based on features showcased in just three* of the many notable sessions given at DrupalCon 2025:

Phase 1: Immediate wins (implement this month)

AI-powered alt text generation – Automatically generate accessible image descriptions when you upload media. Safe, auditable, and provides immediate ROI through improved accessibility compliance.

Content suggestions in sidebar – AI-generated titles, summaries, and tags appear as clickable suggestions. Accelerates content creation while keeping editors in control.

Phase 2: Productivity multipliers (3-6 months)

CK Editor integration – In-editor assistance for translation, spell-checking, and content generation. Embeds AI directly into workflows without changing how people work.

AI automators – Transform content between formats automatically: article to social post, long-form to newsletter, unstructured data to structured fields. Chain them together for sophisticated pipelines.

Phase 3: Strategic capabilities (6-12 months)

AI Search (RAG) – Natural-language search trained exclusively on your content without any hallucinations. Powerful for knowledge bases, documentation sites, and customer self-service portals.

Field widget actions – Inline AI suggestions throughout content forms, offering context-aware assistance exactly when and where editors need it.

Phase 4: Advanced orchestration (12+ months)

Drupal Canvas & AI Agent Swarms – As James Abrahams demonstrated in his session, multiple AI agents working together: one analyzes your request, another searches media, a third generates copy, another assembles components. AI that plans before executing.

Context Control Center – Centralised management of brand voice, audience personas, and design goals. AI agents tap into this automatically, ensuring consistency across all generated content.

Design system integration – AI selects components based on goals, not just descriptions. The Figma-to-Drupal integration lets designers create in familiar tools while AI handles translation to working components.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) – Drupal AI agents communicate with external systems. Jamie’s demo showed a Drupal bot in Slack answering questions by searching Drupal content – built in hours with no custom code.

As James Abrahams noted in his session: Drupal is positioned to win because “no one does human-centric like we do.” When AI generates a page, a human site builder can review and refine it without touching code. This human-AI collaboration is where Drupal’s differentiation lies.

*You can find demos of these features, and more, by watching the following DrupalCon sessions:

• This hands-on workshop with Christoph Breidert and Frederik Wouters (u/wouters_f) 
• This Canvas session presented by James Abrahams (u/yautja_cetanu)
• The landing page builder section from Dries’ keynote.

Your path forward: Why you need an experienced partner?

If you’re reading this and feeling a mix of excitement and overwhelm, that’s exactly the right response. The capabilities are real, the potential is enormous, and the complexity of implementation is significant.

This is where having an experienced partner matters.

SystemSeed brings you Drupal. Drupal brings you Drupal CMS and Drupal AI. Together, we offer something rare in the current AI landscape: safe, open-source AI embedded in reliable infrastructure, delivered by experienced engineers from a respected agency.

This isn’t about chasing every AI trend or implementing technology for its own sake. It’s about having a roadmap. A clear, strategic path forward that:

• Builds on proven, enterprise-grade infrastructure
• Leverages open-source transparency and community innovation
• Integrates AI capabilities that solve real business problems
• Scales with your organisation’s evolving needs
• Starts with quick wins and grows into strategic advantage

The question isn’t whether AI will transform content management and digital experiences. It will. The question is: Are you ready to start implementing?

Your competitors aren’t waiting. Neither should you.